Plein Air Events

Some events for painting small.

Curtis Prairie - July 16th

Went to UW Arboretum yesterday and tried to capture some of the huge clouds passing over the prairie.  Lots of beautiful wild flowers out there.

Babcock Park

 Tom took this photo of me painting this week at Babcock Park.  We had perfect weather with a good breeze to keep the bugs away. These pastels are painted on Pastelmat, a French paper that is smooth and suede-like and holds lots of pigment.  They make a nice yellow color that is good for summer paintings but I often do underpaintings usually with pastel and alcohol which dries fast even when it's chilly.  Pastelmat will take watercolor also.  The park was a good place to paint and I wasn't bothered by the traffic noise. Nice to see Mary and Doug, too!

Another Spring Green Painting

Pat's painting from Spring Green inspired me to share a painting (actually, an underpainting) that's also from the Spring Green Preserve (but not done Plein Air).  There's a lot of good painting material at the preserve and my painting shows one of the views if you hike on the trails to the hill tops.  It was too far to carry my heavy easel.  This is just the underpainting but I'm hesitating to paint over it because I like it as it is.  But one of these days I'll finish it and hopefully not ruin what I consider to be a promising start.

Spring Green Preserve - July 3rd

Above is a watercolor sketch I painted last week at the Spring Green Preserve.  It was beautiful but a bit buggy.  Right is a pastel painting of a dead tree on the main trail with the bluff in the background. I painted that in the studio from the watercolor sketch below.  I think the plein air sketches are more successful. I also enjoyed a visit to the Jura Silverman Gallery in Spring Green.  On July 19 they will have a show featuring Wisconsin artists like Jonathan Wilde & David Bielot.  Mr. Bielot paints large watercolors en plein air with gorgeous washes in them. Pretty amazing paintings.